In light of new data showing China's population shrinking for the second year running, a Shanghai-based think tank has drastically changed its 2100 forecast.
Its a good thing and we should stop wringing hands over declining population. This is the singular way in which we can mantain a habitable planet for humans, is to have fewer humans.
Pass sensible immigration policies and it becomes a non-issue.
The main problem is that most countries don't have their economic system set up for it. The retirement system also in many cases is not sustainable with a shrinking population. This is going to cause a lot of pain and probably countries will start out with policies aiming to increase birth rates to attempt to maintain the status quo.
You're going to face a lot of resistance trying to actually adapt economic policies to a shrinking population. Especially from older people.
Japan and Italy are both going through this right now. I'm not sure its going particularly well, so I think you are generally correct.
We should be putting much more effort into figuring out how to manage this transition, because its both completely necessary, and inevitable.
This some eco-fascist shit, no humans aren't the real virus you Ra'as Al'Ghoul ideating dingus.
Less people just means more work that has to be done by all those machines that directly contribute to the climate crisis via power consumption.
ISTG people be rooting for population decline to fix climate change as if it wasn't what caused the industrial revolution that got us into this mess in the first fucking place.
I do the job a of 3 departments back in 1990. tech will replace humans. Some places have automated warehouses and fast food.
Getting a head start by reducing humans that needed those jobs is a good thing.
Plus if there is less humans there will be less demand which means less work for machine to do anyway.
Also, not like machines are not going to be running on better energy. 20 years ago almost no one had a solar panel on thier house.
A projection 75 years in the future? Yeah, that's almost certainly bullshit. Short term predictions already have optimistic and pessimistic paths based on how we as a society react because this isn't just a physics problem, it's heavily reliant on culture and policy and technological advancement. And birth rates are even more reliant on culture and policy.
No, they just need to be kept in that context. We trusted science on chlorofluorocarbons impacting the ozone layer, and chose to fix it rather than let it keep going. Was the projection "wrong" because CFCs were regulated, or did we just interact with it in a practical way?
The same applies here. There's a population issue that (as you mentioned in another comment) without other factors, will come into effect. China can fix it, or let things play out and see if the "unknowns" can fix it for them.
Except birth rates aren't physics that will progress if left alone, they're dominated by cultural choices that are impacted by economics and governmental policy. There's no such thing as "without other factors", because they're unable to predict fundamental inputs. What's China's economy going to be like in 75 years? How about their food supply under climate change? Is modern day "China" even going to exist? The CCP itself is only 75 years old.
They can't predict the inputs for 75 years, let alone their feedback into birth choices. It's just a highly simplified math sim with arbitrary coefficients for the few things they try to model. Pull a different number from your ass to plug into the economy growth box or add a new function to represent widescale automation and you get whatever number you want. You can look at macro birth rate trends for a single country and think "yeah, I could fit a pretty good exponential decay line to that", except then you look at another country that had the same birth rate in 1950 and the coefficients change. And since it's exponential those little coefficient tweaks make a big difference 75 years later. In 1950 did anyone have any reason to think that Mongolia's 75 year birth rate would be twice that of China? Or South Korea's would be 60 percent?
It's not a matter of doing math well, it's that your unknowns destroy any prediction you're making. If you're doing it correctly you're expanding your error bars as you get further into the future. By 75 years out you're all error.
Its simple demographics. China hasn’t run out of kids, they did that 20 years ago after 1 child policy had been in effect for over 20 years. China is running out of adults on their 20s and 30s. They don’t have the enough people in the right age range to replace their numbers even if they could get young adults to have more kids (hint they are not convincing anyone.)
China is currently one of the fastest aging nations on the planet and it’s only going to get worse.
That's going to be an issue in 10-20 years. Who the fuck knows what it's going to be like 75 years from now. We're talking about a span of time as long as Communist China has existed. 75 years ago computers barely existed.
India needs prosperity like China had from 1996 until 2018 to get close. This is the Chinese century and a lower headcount helps fight long term inflation so all that wealth generated in the beginning will retain its value going into the late this century. Xi should be seeing this as good news.
Japan is having a demographic crash and China is getting jealous... China, you're a cool kid when you're being you - you don't always need to ape Japan.
Hardly the only two countries. In the US it's only masked by immigrants. Fertility is even coming down in most parts of the third world.
It's mainly attributable to women's improved education, career prospects, and access to contraception, plus declining infant mortality. Every single one of these factors is a good thing, but the combination of them will lead to a global demographic crunch over the next century.
I disagree with your statement that it's "masked" by immigrants - I think immigration is a legitimate solution... but I don't disagree with your causes - especially wealth inequality/declining career prospects for everyone.
This must come as a surprise to "pro-family" conservatives but being ground into dust by your employer doesn't really get the mojo flowing.
China‘s crash is much worse. And as uplifting as some people make this headline to be, hundreds of millions of Chinese will suffer greatly from this crash. And no, immigration won‘t solve this. Who wants to move to a crumbling communist China decades from now when their LED skylines stopped light polluting the night sky? I mean I already would never want to live there and it won‘t get better from here.
This is why America has the advantage of immigration. If our population declines, our culture is more adaptable and able to integrate people from different backgrounds than a place like China.
Edit: This is apparently controversial, but I don’t see how it isn’t true. Lemmians love to downvote the truth.
By 2100, the world's second-largest population could number just 525 million, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS) has predicted.
The report came on the heels of Chinese statistics bureau data showing that more people died than were born in China for the second consecutive year in 2023.
"It amazes me how everyone seems to agree that the planet already has too many people whose demands for even the basics of existence like food, water and shelter are placing intolerable demands on the ecosystem—yet as soon as the population of a country begins to decline, its government reacts with near panic," the Associated Press quoted June Teufel Dreyer, Chinese politics specialist at the University of Miami, as saying.
This can lead to a shortage of skilled workers, decreased labor supply, and increased pressure on a country's medical and social welfare systems.
To this end, both the central and local governments have in recent years introduced measures to entice couples to have larger families.
However, these have so far had a limited overall impact in the face of changing preferences among young urbanites, China's slowing economy, and the higher cost of living in first-tier cities.
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